Hello, is there a Pied Piper out there?

Hello, is there a Pied Piper out there?

JAKARTA (JP): He's a bit of a hyperbolist this Dutch friend of
mine, so when he started telling me this tale I thought 'Well,
here we go, another shaggy dog story from Johan'. I wasn't far
wrong but it was a 'shaggy rat' story or rather a story about a
rat he thought was almost the size of a dog.

I let him talk...it's best that way, especially when he's in
his cups...and soon realized that he might have a point. He was
talking about a rat he had seen here in Jakarta, a rodent 'the
size of a small dog'.

His florid face was pulsing with the telling of this, and
while I was allowing for a little exaggeration here and there I
conceded that there are rats of a quite extraordinary size in the
city. Too many of them!

And look at them for heaven's sake. Complacent? I'd say so.
Comfortable? They are so damn complacent and comfortable that
they wear top hats and doff them to you as they waddle by; 'Good
evening, all.'

And have you ever seen a Jakarta cat in a close encounter with
a rat? Fat chance. They've worked out a system of co-existence
that would astonish the warring factions of the Middle East, and
deliver sermons to the death-grapplers of Afghanistan and
Northern Ireland.

Friend Johan's temple was quopping, a blue vein throbbing as
he went on. The rat he'd seen was half the length of the cafe
table and probably big enough to pull a coach.

As we shuddered mutually at the thought of this gargantuan
rodent, a thought occurred to me and not for the first time. Why
does the city government not put a bounty on the rat population
of Jakarta? Rp 500 for each tail, say.

There are armies of mischievous little boys and unemployed
youth out there who would gladly bring in tails by the score if
the Jakarta city government would only put up a bounty. And they
would have a social purpose far more broadly beneficial than
those self-appointed youth traffic cops that mill the wind at U-
turns and intimidate motorists.

Rats do not count as wildlife, except in the most banal sense.
They are not likely to invoke the sentimentality of animal rights
activists or prompt poets to compose couplets such as 'A robin
redbreast in a cage/Sets all of heaven in a rage' (Blake).

They are, after all, immemorially associated with the C14
Black Death, the plague that swept out of Central Asia along the
caravan trails to the Middle East and killed a third of the
population of Europe.

Plague-ridden bodies figured in an early example of biological
warfare, catapulted over the walls of Black Sea ports by Mongol
raiders to infect visiting Venetian and Genoese traders, who duly
carried the contagion back with them across the Mediterranean.

Even as recently as 1997 the World Health Organization was
reporting an outbreak of rat-borne plague in the Central Asian
republic of Kazakhstan. The whole impoverished former Soviet
region was vulnerable to the disease, and with civil war raging
in Tajikistan and Afghanistan -- who would have relied on the
Taleban to take preventative measures? -- we could easily have
seen a major outbreak across a much wider area.

Perhaps it is because the Black Death never penetrated the
Malay archipelago -- it is true there was an outbreak here in the
early part of this century and again in 1945-1949 as a direct
result of the Dutch blockade but not on the scale of the Black
Death -- that officialdom here has such an insouciant attitude to
the presence of rats.

There is no folk memory among the people of these islands of
whole districts being laid waste, of hard-earned granaries being
destroyed by 'rattus rattus', that furry dark skulker in corners,
drains and ceilings.

In Britain, for example, the Plague is still recalled in the
children's rhyme, 'A ring, a ring of roses/ A pocket full of
posies/ Atishoo, atishoo, we all fall down'.

Whatever the case, wouldn't it be nice to see a war on this
pest get under way. And let the boys -- and girls, if they wish
-- of this city take some money home into the bargain. Perhaps a
civic award for champion ratcatcher would be best of all. Out
there in the slum districts of Manggarai or Tanjung Priok there
must surely be one enterprising young person who would be happy
to be crowned 'Pied Piper of Jakarta'.

I, for one, would rejoice at his or her coronation. And so too
would Johan.

-- David Jardine